Before the video emerged, there was a standard story in the media about the shooting of Walter Scott.
Police in a matter of hours declared the occurrence at the corner of Remount and Craig roads a traffic stop gone wrong, alleging the dead man fought with an officer over his Taser before deadly force was employed.
So familiar. A police officer claims a black man struggled with him for his weapon, and then the officer had to shoot him to protect himself.
Damn. This video is raw. You may not want to watch it if violence makes you cringe…even if it is state-sanctioned violence that the perpetrators get away with.
The slate of Hugo Award nominees has been announced, and it contains a sorry collection of right-wing has-beens who put together a set of Vox-Day-approved candidates and then went cruising through #gamergate, gathering assholes who would vote for them simply to poke Social Justice Warriors in the eye, rather than on the basis of the quality of the writing. They called it the “Sad Puppy slate”. I’ll just point out that there was no comparable effort to assemble a bloc of ideologically liberal authors and then ask people to vote for them sight unseen — which I would have also said was ethically questionable and rather undermines the purpose of a writing award.
The best take yet on the problematic nature of ballot-stuffing comes from Patrick Nielsen-Hayden.
But I’ve seen their little chats; they’re going to be promoting these dangerous games instead. Randi Harper was SWATed. Somebody is going to get seriously hurt in one of these false alarms.
I’m following the twitter conversation about the American Atheists convention this weekend, and in particular Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s talk. She’s reported to have said this:
If you are gay the worst the Christian community can do in America is not serve you cake.…I just want you to think about being Muslim and gay today…the worst case scenario…bullies throw you off a building.
Amidst all these indignant Christians in Indiana and elsewhere insisting that it is their right to be uncharitable snots to people who don’t obey their orders about who to love, there are some good stories, too. The Oakland A’s baseball team is having an LGBT Night.
That’s not the good part, although it is mighty decent of them.
A bunch of Oakland A’s fair-weather fans are upset about that, and are trying to sell off their tickets for that night.
That’s definitely not the good part, either.
The SPLC has identified eight active Hate Groups in Minnesota. This is so un-Minnesotan: we’re only supposed to have Passive Aggressive Groups here. In case you want to know who to avoid on your trip to the Mall of America or the Spam Museum, here’s the abbreviated list:
Redundant posts are redundant
Except when they aren’t.
Here your gender-workshop-taskmistress Crip Dyke encourages you to revisit the douchegabbery of the Minnesota Child Protection League. PZ did an excellent job of illuminating just that in “Two steps forward, one step back” in December of last year, and the discussion on that thread when it was current included a great many useful comments.
I want, however, not to merely rehash criticisms of MCPL (criticisms well-deserved and well-made the first time around) but to use that example to talk a bit about what “centering” and “marginalized” really mean. In the post on the need for transfeminist critiques of other feminisms, I focussed on Katha Pollit and identified places where, quite frankly, I think she employed some bad thinking to construct some bad feminism. I suggested that marginalization had something to do with this bad thinking on Pollit’s part. Here you can learn more about exactly what marginalization has to do with it …and the extent of my criticism of Pollit, rather than merely Pollit’s column.
I didn’t pick Pollit because her work is low hanging fruit. She has written excellently on many topics. She clearly has the writing chops to be clear about the distinctions between political theorizing and political rhetoric. Yet the only reasonable inference is that she was, in fact, talking about rhetoric when she was using the phrase “political analysis”. She also has the analytical skills to make the distinction between gendered terms like the French pronouns ils and elles, and gender neutral words like people. Yet here, too, she fell down.
So what is the problem with this Katha Pollit person anyway? The problem is the same as one in our community: the inability to think like you’re not. [Read more…]
After that peculiar documentary on atheism that made it seem like we’re all just white men pinin’ for a church, CNN makes partial amends with an article on black atheists by Mandisa Thomas.
